U.S. Media Network Eliminates Legacy Video Analytics System by Integrating Datazoom & Google Analytics

Combination quickly operationalizes raw data, lowering costs and speeding time to market

Realized Value

The flexibility and transparency of Datazoom’s Data Pipes enable the Company to exert total control and centrally capture, classify, and connect raw playback data in real-time.

• Greater cost control. Datazoom + Google Analytics (free version) eliminated the need to keep the incumbent analytic system, resulting in ~50% financial savings.

• Decreased time to live

  • Time to go-live with Datazoom + Google Analytics in less than 3 hours for web platforms. Phased onto mobile and connected platforms over the course of two months

  • Datazoom reduces the complexity of maintaining multiple integrations with its single line of code (and libraries), and centralized “command center” UI.

  • Datazoom is developer friendly and able to easily co-exist with home-brewed systems

• Raw data turned into insights. Real-time, raw, data means faster and more accurate decision making.

Challenge

DOES THIS SITUATION SOUND FAMILIAR?

The Media Network (Company) operates three 24-hour cable networks in the United States. One distributes content across 10 platforms, another provides a subscription streaming service, and the third is a digital publishing extension which creates novelizations of previously aired original movie favorites. Realizing it was time to innovate their streaming strategies and analytics infrastructure, they started by completing a total player migration and kicked off a company-wide initiative to revitalize their data strategy. This became a valuable starting-point for asking hard questions about their current analytics solutions.

“Are these metrics consistent? Is the data supporting them redundant? How valuable are the analytics which supports our operations? How many systems and resources will I need to dedicate to maintain this approach?”

Even with previously-approved implementations of their analytics providers, the conflict of expectations and support imposed a constant drain on the development resources needed for other projects.

Solution

Working with Datazoom and their player provider, the Company built a phased implementation plan to achieve specific business goals. Once the connection between the video player and the Datazoom platform was established (a process which took approximately 15 minutes and was deployed directly into the production environment), teams were able to focus on specific data points which needed to be captured, at which frequency, and routed to Google Analytics in order to generate the necessary metrics for reports that drive their business. Datazoom and Google Analytics quickly operationalized their raw data and allowed them to realize what was once only imagined with their previous solution.

You can operationalize your video data too! Check out this article on how you can configure Datazoom + Google Analytics here. Then sign up for your free, 15 day, 5GB trial of Datazoom.

Happy Analyzing!

Broadcaster, Content Owner, OTT Platform Operator

Hallmark Media Family Networks is the team behind Hallmark’s wildly popular 24-hour cable networks: Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Drama, and Hallmark Movies and Mysteries.

They oversee content distribution across ten web, mobile, and OTT platforms with successful content offerings such as Home & Family, The Good Witch film franchise, and the historic Hallmark Hall of Fame their wildly successful original Christmas movies — more than 80 million people flock to their televisions to revel in the merriment of the season (which starts as early as September!).

Highlights

• Real-time analytics and reporting stack available company wide

• Consolidated multiple analytics and reporting solutions into a single platform

• Re-invest costs associated with multiple analytics solutions to other parts of the business

Challenges

With the consolidation of teams and platforms, Hallmark Media wanted to leverage the opportunity to improve their OTT streaming stack. During this time, they realized that part and parcel to improved streaming was the need to embark on a company-wide initiative to restructure their data strategy. Even with previously-approved implementations of their analytics providers, the conflict of expectations and support imposed a constant drain on development resources and budgets that were needed for other projects.

• Reduce the number of reporting and analytics solutions in use across the different media properties

• Eliminate the need for constant development resources needed to optimize and configure different analytics solutions

Solution

Knowing that they’d be looking to do more with BigQuery & Google Analytics than they’d previously explored, Hallmark looked to Infotrust to help them define and deliver a video analytics solution leveraging Datazoom as a source of video data. Infotrust began with an audit of Hallmark’s current analytics implementations to better understand how they were being used and by what teams, where shortcomings existed, additional things they wanted to accomplish with their new analytics stack. The Infotrust analytics consulting team provided a detailed breakdown of all the requirements, as well as how data should flow to both BigQuery & Google Analytics to meet those requirements. Then Infotrust got to work, partnering and coordinating with Hallmark Media and Datazoom’s team to build metrics, dashboards and reports to monitor Audience, Content, Advertising and core video KPIs. This then translated into defining what events, metadata fluxdata and custom events/metadata were needed to generate the required insights. Infotrust, Datazoom and Hallmark Media met regularly to ensure that the schedule was being kept, and deliverables met expectations.

Results

Infotrust ensured that by the end of the engagement, Hallmark Media had a more powerful, reliable, real-time reporting and analytics stack. By implementing Datazoom as their Data-as-a-Service platform, they now have a developer friendly solution that helped them reduce the number of analytics solutions used, and reduced the complexity of maintaining multiple solutions. The overall engagement with Infotrust and Datazoom has allowed their team to re-invest both resources and analytics cost savings into other areas of their business.

With the consolidation of teams and platforms, Hallmark Media wanted to leverage the opportunity to improve their OTT streaming stack. During this time, they realized that part and parcel to improved streaming was the need to embark on a company-wide initiative to restructure their data strategy. Even with previously-approved implementations of their analytics providers, the conflict of expectations and support imposed a constant drain on development resources and budgets that were needed for other projects.

• Reduction in number of analytics and reporting solutions

• Cost-savings related to licensing and maintenance of multiple analytics and reporting services

• Improved agility and flexibility to configure future analytics and reporting requiremetns

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Datazoom’s DaaS platform was the only solution on the market which could consolidate data collection across multiple end devices, replacing a number of incumbent analytics and reporting integrations. While enabling this consolidation to a single data collection SDK, the DataZoom platform also provided a low-code means to configuring, optimizing, and building future data pipes. This reduced the amount of development and capital resources required to support the existing analytics and reporting stack, allowing Crown Media to divert those resources to other priority projects without undermining the collection and delivery of data to business units across the organization.

Content Owner, OTT Platform Operator

Company

Canela Media is a leading, certified minority-owned technology driven media company offering brands a complete ecosystem to connect with multicultural audiences starting with its free streaming platform service, Canela.TV enriching the new generation of U.S. Latinos with free access to unique, culturally relevant content which includes a unique blend of music programming through Canela Music featuring emerging and established Latino artists, Spanish-language Children’s content through Canela Kids and sports content through Canela Deportes.    As part of Canela Media’s proprietary data solution offering, Canela Connect is centered on an OTT first approach that helps identify U.S. Hispanic audiences in English and Spanish language OTT platforms providing unprecedented OTT scale for advertisers to reach U.S. Hispanics. Moreover, Canela Media’s large scale in premium Spanish-language sites, combined with the company’s proprietary data, provides in-depth knowledge and understanding of how to establish meaningful and culturally relevant connections with the new mainstream Hispanics across the U.S. and Latin America. 

Solution

• Consolidated data pipelines across the company onto a single platform

• Integrated data stream with existing toolchains increasing the speed of data insights

• Addressed all devices through a single SDK for data collection

Results

By leveraging the Datazoom platform, Canela Media is able to leverage a single, cost-scalable solution to power a broad scope of analytics requirements to support product, engineering, ad sales and ad ops teams. Canela Media has the flexibility to route data to new endpoints and dashboards, in order to remain in control of their data and analytics journey.

• Consolidate data capture needs across business units into a single platform

• Improved insight into how users engage with content

• Able to leverage existing investment in data analysis and visualization tools

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As a turnkey Data-as-a-Service platform, we were able to get up and running very quickly. By implementing just a single element into our video player (the DataZoom SDK), we could build a variety of different data pipes to deliver metrics to business units across the organization. This allowed us to get up and running quickly to better understand how viewers engage with our content and streaming platform while providing a means to maximize views and revenue.